Name: Meat Pie
Ingredients: 1½ pounds chopped beef; rich biscuit dough; salt; pepper; 2 tablespoons butter; 6 hard boiled eggs

Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Meat Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

Boil the chopped beef for 1½ hours.
Line a baking pan with rich biscuit dough.
Pour the cooked meat and gravy into the pan.
Season with salt, pepper, and butter.
Cut the hard-boiled eggs in half and lay them on top.

Bake

Cover with more biscuit dough and bake for 1 hour.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Biscuit + peppertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together841 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,847 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Biscuit + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,009 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Chopped beef: Provides the main savoury filling and bulk of the pie.
Rich biscuit dough: Forms the crust that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.
Hard boiled eggs: Add firm, sliced richness and body to the filling layer.
Butter: Adds fat for richness and flavour to the filling.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.